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The Cassini spacecraft has been in orbit around Saturn since 2004 and has since been approved for both a first and second extended mission. As hardware reaches and exceeds its documented life expectancy, it becomes vital to closely monitor hardware performance. The performance of the 1-N hydrazine attitude control thrusters is especially important to study, because the spacecraft is currently operating on the back-up thruster branch. Early identification of hardware degradation allows more time to develop mitigation strategies. There is no direct measure of an individual thruster's thrust magnitude, but these values can be estimated by post-processing spacecraft telemetry. This paper develops an algorithm to calculate the individual thrust magnitudes using Euler's equation. The algorithm correctly shows the known degradation in the first thruster branch, validating the approach. Results for the current thruster branch show nominal performance as of August, 2015.

Publication Date:

Jan 04, 2016

Document ID:

20170008279

(Acquired Sep 11, 2017)

Subject Category:

ASTRODYNAMICS; SPACECRAFT PROPULSION AND POWER

Document Type:

Conference Paper

Publication Information:

(SEE 20170008305)

Meeting Information:

AIAA SciTech 2016; 4-6 Jan. 2016; San Diego, CA; United States

Meeting Sponsor:

American Inst. of Aeronautics and Astronautics; Reston, VA, United States